Healer role design change?

[Shurrikhan]

BLM works in FFXIV today because of shoehorning, not because its design is perfectly suited to this game. The "challenge" and "brilliant design" of BLM that is so praised by the hardcore community is... <checks notes> ...memorizing the safe spots in fights so you can sit still for precious seconds and memorizing when there aren't any for a bit so you have to save your big movement CDs for then. In other words, figuring out how to overcome BLM objectively NOT being suited to the game's current combat design that is so focused on motion and "the dance". And the last several expansions have all been focused on giving BLM more mobility. BLM is more mobile than RDM in current FFXIV entirely due to that. It's been given so much on-demand mobility because its basic kit and rotational design doesn't work with FFXIV encounter designs.

And previously melee would have to figure out how to slightly alter their rotation or pick GCD tiers so that they could complete a combo just before downtime so they could use their ranged skills without breaking combo, would need to know the exact timing of AoEs (which don't always go off at the end of casts, nor a consistent amount of time prior, etc.) so they can better greed, etc., etc. And if one didn't want to learn a fight positionally as DPS... Rangers were right there.

Again... do we really need to strip the melee-ranged-based complexities from Melee, the casting-based complexities from Casters, etc.?

Is it actually better to just roll over and strip it all away... rather than simply to reward it commensurately (as, yes, BLM does with its highest rDPS in the game)?

Imagine, for a moment, current WHM design without Lilies. So no Solace, Rapture, nor Misery.

It wouldn't be functional.

Imagine, for a moment, SCH without Aetherflow. It wouldn't make the cut, either. And why would it?

Imagine, for a moment, any other healer with 2400 (or 1200n) less mobile curative ppm and 930 less offensive ppm.

None of them would survive that. I'm not sure why we're treating this as something WHM-specific.

Hell, the Lily system provides more mobility than its analogs on other healers.* It doesn't need an outright Lightspeed or the like. Yes, that makes Lilies a bit more important to WHM than AF or AG to SCH and SGE, respectively, but... how is that a problem? We wouldn't pretend either of those jobs would be complete without their core systems, so why pretend WHM is uniquely a core system away from failure.

*That's probably why attaching, say, a 50% cast time reduction to PoM would actually be excessive (even if attaching a 2.5s cast time reduction to Thin Air would probably be fine and arguably deserved).